11
THE DRIVE TO the hospital was a nightmare. Despite the story Tanner told Jules about his grandfather, repeating history and navigating the back roads all the way to the relatively small hospital left him both agitated and worried. He still couldn’t understand where his father’s fury had come from. While he and his dad didn’t get along, he’d never seen him behave that way toward anyone, least of all a woman. And he had to go and call Jules a whore. No way Tanner should have ever hit his father, but he couldn’t allow any man, much less his father, to treat her that way.
One thing certainly couldn’t excuse the other.
In the back of the truck, Jules continued performing CPR and taking care of his father. As soon as they pulled up at the hospital, two orderlies rushed out with the gurney and the doctor on duty—Dr. Benham. Doc Clayton pulled in on their heels.
Everything was a rush then. They got the Colonel onto the gurney and then inside. Minutes later, Doc Clayton came out and informed him they were going to be running some tests, but that he should prepare himself for surgery.
Tanner signed the necessary paperwork and then he had nothing to do but wait. When a soft hand found his and interlaced her fingers, he found Jules standing there, her hair wild and tousled, her face ruddy and tracked with a hint of tears.
God, had she been crying for his father?
She snuggled into him, then wrapped her arms around him, hugging him tight. He’d never needed an embrace more.
“There are days when I really hate that bastard,” he admitted, even if that admission sent him straight to hell. “But I don’t want him to die.”
“I know you don’t,” she said, even as she eased out of his arms, captured his hands, then drew him toward the sitting room. Despite the hospital’s small size, they did offer a relatively comfortable waiting area. At this time in the middle of the night, they were alone.
She nodded toward the seats. “I’m going to get us some coffee. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll bring you some?”
Resisting the offer, he stayed on his feet. “They probably only have vending machine coffee here. I’ll go with you.” Better to stay on his feet, better not to sit and dwell on what had just gone down with his dad. So side by side they went in search of the “food hall,” where a few vending machines waited with everything from fancy coffee to microwavable food.
“You know . . .” He sighed, studying their options. It was like they had too many. “The last time we stood in front of vending machines was a lot more fun.”
An almost embarrassed giggle escaped from her, but she smiled up at him. “I was actually just thinking that,” she admitted. “At least we have more options this time.”
“Always looking on the bright side, aren’t you?”
“Someone has to. Especially someone who doesn’t look at everything as a challenge.”
He’d been accused of worse, so he accepted the criticism. “I don’t look at everything as a challenge, just you and Satan.”
“So I guess I’m in good company, Satan being Satan and all.”
He knew what she was doing, and he was willing to let it slide. Playing with her helped. The distraction helped. “He’s beautiful, he’s fierce, and he’s very talented.” So was she. More than she knew.
“He was also abused. He doesn’t want to give up his freedom. He’s lonely and he’s mad at the world for it.”
No. Tanner shook his head. He understood the animal. More than he’d understood another creature in a long time. “I don’t think he’s lonely so much as he doesn’t feel like he has a place. Stallions need to be needed. They need a herd to run with, mares to take care of, and an open range. I don’t know where he was before. You may be right about his being abused, but he wants to be top dog, and he doesn’t know how to work with anyone else.”
“Are you talking about the horse, or yourself?”
“I’m not big on self-analysis.” He paid for their coffee and got a couple of breakfast burritos out of the vending machine. They’d probably taste like ass, but he’d dragged Jules out of bed in the middle of the night and now he had no idea how long they were to be at the hospital. They used the microwave right next to the vending machines to heat the burritos up while sipping their coffee.
“Maybe not, but you’re incredibly self-aware. I recognized that in you at the Silver Dollar. You’ve been on a journey since we met.”
He waited out the microwave, using the time to mull over her observation.
“My father and I have never had the best relationship,” he admitted. It might be the understatement of the year. “When my sister graduated high school, I couldn’t be here because I was deployed. But I did get to talk to her. She got accepted to a college out east, and half of it was covered by scholarship, and the other half under my dad’s military benefits. She told me she was leaving and planned to never come back. She wanted out of this horse town with its backward views and jokes for relatives.”
He’d almost forgotten that conversation. His sister had been angry, something that the Colonel had said to her, but she wouldn’t tell him what it was. She was angry at Tanner because he hadn’t come home. She didn’t care that he was deployed and stuck in Okinawa. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that her big brother wasn’t there for her, just like her father had never been there. Our family doesn’t stick together, Tanner. We’re a pack of wolves—a pack of loners. And the sooner I get out of here, the better.
“Not everybody has great relationships with their parents. Our parents aren’t here to be our friends.” Jules sounded like she almost believed it. “Sometimes they don’t understand us or our choices, and sometimes we fight. They’re supposed to make sure that we have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and access to a good education. Everything else is like a modern invention of what we think family should be. Families were businesses for a really long time, the only people you knew who could be loyal to you. When the chips are down, who else can you rely on but family? You and your dad may not have a good relationship, but he needed you and here you are.”
He handed her his coffee, then retrieved their burritos out of the microwave and carried them back to the waiting room. He let her choose the seats, and when she settled down on a sofa, he accepted the unspoken invitation to join her. She put their coffees on the rickety coffee table in front of them.
“I came home because Doc Clayton said the Colonel was going to die if someone didn’t come back here and take over the ranch. Trust me, it wasn’t my first choice.” Admitting it aloud made him feel less of a man. But when he looked to Jules, he found no judgment in her eyes.
“So what was your first choice?” She worked on peeling the paper off her burrito, jerking her fingers away as though stung with each tug. Catching her wrist, he peeled away the wrapper for her, ignoring the burn on his own skin.
“First, I called my sister, she’s an attorney up in Chicago. She’s been there for a few years. She went to college, went to law school, and got an offer right out of graduating. She’s been at the same firm for now, I don’t know—almost eight years? She’s bucking for partner. That’s why she couldn’t come. Because, well, as she put it, the Colonel always put his career first, so she had to do the same.”
Jules flashed him a quiet smile when he handed her food back, but she dug into it. He mirrored her actions, eating because they needed to eat. Sawdust probably would’ve tasted better. After washing down a bite with some too-sweet coffee, he continued. “Next I called my brother, but it’s hard to get a hold of him. He’s an aspiring musician—whatever the hell that means—and he’s got a great gig in New York at the moment, so he wasn’t interested in leaving it all for ‘the land where music died.’ In his words, well, the Colonel would just have to understand.” He shook his head, disgust eating like acid through his gut. “I don’t really know what happened to him. He had a lot of potential when he was younger—he could have gone to any college. Could have enlisted. But he didn’t do any of those things. That meant it was up to me. I’m the eldest; I left first. So I suppose it’s poetic that I came home first.”
“You sound an awful lot like your dad right there.” The quiet admonishment drew him up short and he jerked. No, he didn’t want to sound like his father, the only thing he and his dad had in common . . .
“Jules, the only thing the Colonel and I have in common is the corps.”
“Did you hope that by joining, it would bring you closer?”
He never thought about it that way. Not that he really wanted to think about it now. “I joined the corps because that’s what was expected. Grandpa was a Marine, the Colonel was a Marine, my great-grandfather was in the navy, and his father was in the army. Military, it’s what we do.”
“That’s avoiding the question.”
After managing to eat half the burrito, and having it settle in his stomach like a lead weight, he leaned back on the sofa. When he stretched an arm behind her, she leaned into him and rested her leg against his.
“You asked me if I thought it would make us closer, and that wasn’t why I joined.”
Sitting sideways, Jules maintained the contact of her leg on his. “It doesn’t have to be the reason why you did something, but what were you hoping to get out of it?”
Nothing. He joined the Marines because that’s what was expected of him, and he’d been good at it. “You don’t go in to serve your country, thinking you’re going to get rewarded for it. Joining gives you a lot of perks, like training, job skills, trade skills, hell—even people skills sometimes. They send you to places sometimes good, sometimes bad. But it’s about the mission; it’s about getting the job done. The only thing I expected when I went into the Marines was to do my damn job.”
With a light hand, she caught his free hand and gave it a squeeze. “Well, I’ll let it go for now, but I want you to think about something for me. Do you mind if I ask that?”
Right now she could ask for the moon and he would do his best to give it to her. “You can ask me anything you want.”
“All right, I want you to think about the fact that you were raised by two very strong, independent, and determined men. I don’t know what your dad was like when you were a kid, but I’ve had a few months to observe the Colonel now. Based on what you’ve told me about your grandpa, I get that your dad was away a lot—like you’ve been. He went where the job sent him.” She paused as though waiting for him to acknowledge it, so Tanner nodded.
He knew exactly who the Colonel was, who he’d always been. He was the man off on the next assignment. When he was younger, Tanner asked why he didn’t take his family with him, but Grandpa only said it was better for the kids to be raised in a stable atmosphere, not having to move from base to base, and that it was easier on his father if he didn’t have to worry about the family following him on his assignments, especially after the death of Tanner’s mother. Another memory he’d prefer to leave hidden in the vaults of history.
“So maybe, like you, your dad went into the Marines because it was what was expected of him. It’s what you did. What he did. And maybe he thought, or at least I think he thought, that the shared experience should’ve brought you closer. At least given you some insight into the choices that he makes. The man he’s become. You’re both fierce, and determined men. You also both like to get your own way, and neither of you likes taking no for an answer.”
The last comment hit a nerve, and dug deep. She wasn’t wrong. He hadn’t been allowing her to tell him no. Even though he respected that she didn’t want to sleep with him, he still found every excuse he could to throw them together, and she’d rewarded him by showing up to seek him out at least once. He didn’t always show her the respect she deserved, which made him even more of an ass. He’d tried to make amends without really acknowledging what he’d been doing wrong.
“Okay, I don’t like it, but I’ll give you that one. I am not a big fan of no. I learned a long time ago how to turn no way into way.” He’d applied the same concept to winning Jules’s affection. Maybe he needed to start earning it. . . .
Her grin was welcoming and forgiving. “I figured that out about you. So let’s say you now have a case of two men, neither of whom wants to hear the word no, thrown into a situation where one has to come home to help the other, and the other has to let the first one come home to help. Neither one of you wants to be in this equation. You don’t want to have to give him help, and he doesn’t want to have to accept it. Yet here you are, and he resents your being here because it says he can’t do it on his own anymore—that he has to accept no.”
The observation struck him like a revelation. Never would he have looked at it that way or even considered it as an option. Not even a little bit.
But Jules wasn’t done. She said, “And now you have to be here, because you did accept a no. You accepted no more in your career. No more of what you wanted to do, and you came. You made a sacrifice, and returned home to help him. You didn’t want to be here, and worse, you did it—you took the no and now you resent him because he’s fighting you every step of the way.” The description resonated with him, and it rubbed his skin the wrong way.
Even turning her quiet accusation over in his mind, he couldn’t help but disagree with it at least a little because it didn’t feel totally right. She wasn’t all wrong—he did resent his father. He resented that man for not being there for him, for his sister, for his brother, but most of all he resented . . . “Grandpa had a heart attack.” It was a piece of his past he didn’t like to talk about, a dark memory of the time when he’d been at his most helpless. “He was alone in the barn, doing something, probably taking care of the horses. It was what Grandpa loved to do. He loved the ranch and he didn’t slow down for anyone.” Leaning his head back against the sofa he stared at the ceiling. When Jules folded into him, it felt right to have her there. Then she tucked her head against his shoulder, and some of the itchy tension in his chest eased.
“Grandpa didn’t ask for help—he didn’t expect any. We all had our chores and we were supposed to do them. Or there’d be hell to pay. I liked getting out, running wild with my friends, including Mateo. We always made sure the work was done, so we could have the freedom we craved. So this one night, Mateo and I hared off after dark, when we were supposed to be doing our homework and sleeping. Grandpa had a heart attack—in the barn—alone. Nobody found him until the next morning, when Ramon went down to start the feed. We rushed him to the hospital; they did surgery.”
The echoes to his current situation weren’t lost on him. Only then, he’d been sixteen, and he hadn’t known what to do. Ramon and Maria looked after him and his siblings, but Tanner thought his father should have done more. Fought harder to be with his family. Shown up. When he didn’t, Tanner focused on his siblings, tried to do what Grandpa would have done. He fought for patience.
“I called the Colonel when they said it was serious. They’d performed the surgery, but they didn’t think he was gonna make it. ‘Time down is muscle.’ ” Even as he recalled the doctor’s phrase, he’d hated those words. Jules’s grip on his hand tightened.
“The Colonel was stationed in North Carolina at the time, doing training exercises or something, I don’t know. I probably knew then but I don’t remember; maybe I just don’t care. I called and I left a message when we got Grandpa here. Then I called again when they gave us the news that they didn’t think he’d make it. When I finally called the third time, I got through, and all the Colonel said was, ‘Well, when it’s time it’s time.’ But he couldn’t get away.”
“He didn’t come?” Quiet outrage echoed in Jules’s voice.
“No, he didn’t. His unit had exercises, and he was training new recruits. It was his job, and it came first. He wasn’t coming home.”
She rubbed her cheek to his shoulder. He brought his hand up to rest against her hair, almost desperate for the sensation of not being alone. Her warmth wrapped around him and kept him stable. “His own fucking father was dying, and he had three kids here who relied on Grandpa for everything because the Colonel was never around, and he was too busy. He said no.”
“Tanner, I’m sorry.” What else could she say?
“I didn’t tell you that to get sympathy, beautiful. Grandpa was a tough old fart. He recovered, came home, and even went back to work. He lasted another six months. He refused to die. Then the Colonel came home.”
Tanner stared at the ceiling and shook his head.
“Grandpa died the next day.” Never had Tanner put that part together before. Grandpa made it six months past when the surgeon said he probably wouldn’t. His father refused to come home, and Tanner had never forgiven him for that. Until the moment he told Jules, he hadn’t realized how much he still hated his father over that issue. But he’d hated him even more when he finally did come home, because then Tanner lost his grandfather. The best man in the world.
“You miss your grandfather a lot, don’t you?”
“Every day. ’Course, you know what he’d say?” He ran a hand over his face and wiped away the tears trying to escape. “He’d tell me to stop sitting here bellyaching like some wounded calf. There’s work to be done, and a ranch to run.” The hours were wearing on, and it would be dawn soon.
“I think he’d also tell you he’s proud of you.” Jules wanted to comfort him, and he let her. Grandpa might have said that, but it would be with a solid whack to his head for being a crybaby. “Even if he didn’t use those words.”
The hours seemed to drag, but Jules didn’t leave him. “You’re not alone,” she murmured after a long silence. “My dad was a lot like the Colonel.”
He seriously doubted that.
“No, I mean he was—emotionally distant and kind of mean.” With a sigh, she shifted against him and took his hand again. “My dad used to ride the rodeo circuit, and my mom was big on animal rescue. She used to protest the rodeos. Guess what? Opposites attract, and they fell in love. Craziest thing, he loved what he did, and she hated it so much.”
Eager for anything she wanted to share, he soaked in her words.
“They loved each other. A lot. Dad had an accident when I was little, a bull broke his back and he ended up paralyzed. My mom stood by him for all the surgeries; I remember going back and forth to the hospital, but this big, boisterous fun guy I remember when I was little turned into this dark, mean, cruel man.” It was his turn to squeeze her hand as she spoke. “I get it now. I get he was depressed and anxious, and dealing with this life-changing accident, but he was also really cruel to my mother. Said horrible things, and when he came home it got worse. It’s why I spent so much time with my aunt and uncle.”
They’d been getting her out of an abusive household.
“I think he wanted to make my mother leave him, and I always had a tough time loving him after that because he was mean to Mom. When I asked my mom, once, why she wouldn’t leave him, she said, ‘Your father is a good man, but he’s a fiercely proud one. He doesn’t want to be dependent on anyone—he wants to be the one taking care of us. I stay because I love him and I need him.’ ”
Jules laughed a little.
“Can you believe they’re still together? They still fight, but he got help and he loves Mom. He’s learned how to be independent even in a wheelchair.” Lifting his hand to her lips, she took him by surprise when she kissed his knuckles. “Your dad’s like that, too. The Colonel’s angry at his lot in life—just like you are. You two are taking it out on each other.”
And her, Tanner realized. The Colonel more so, but Tanner kept putting her in the line of fire, and she hadn’t left him, either.
“It’s not totally the same though, Jules.”
“You’re right,” she said, tilting her head to meet his gaze. He could drown in those gorgeous eyes of hers. “You learned not to need the Colonel over the years, same way he did. He needs you now though, more than he’ll ever admit. So you have to decide: Are you strong enough to fight to stay with him for him and expect nothing in return? Because you’re a little bit of a hero yourself over there. You were your grandpa’s hero, and you’re Satan’s hero—can you be the Colonel’s?”
“I don’t know.” Thankfully, she didn’t judge him for the answer.
Jules rubbed his arm. “I’m going to go call Maria and Ramon. They should know what’s going on. We’ll make sure the horses are taken care of; I need to head back and check on Charity anyway. After, I can swing back here and see how you’re doing.”
Tanner frowned. “You should go home and get some sleep. I got you up at two and you haven’t had any rest. I’ll take care of things at the ranch.”
“Yeah, I haven’t had any rest, but neither have you. What I did have was this fabulously oversweetened mocha whatever, a cardboard burrito, and the chance to help a friend. Currently, I’m still on the helping-out front. Let me keep helping.”
“Jules . . .” The woman constantly delighted him, but he couldn’t ask her for more.
“You know why you can let me keep doing this?”
Something about the gleam in her eyes told him he was going to find out. “No, why don’t you tell me?”
“You can, because between the two of us, we can get it all done, and once we’ve both had some sleep, you’re going to call me.”
His eyebrows raised. “Go on.”
“You’re going to call and ask me out to dinner.” She smiled. “Then I’m going to say yes. But only if you let me help you out.”
“That’s blackmail.” Yet in a strange way her offer made him feel better. Not to mention the fact that he got his date.
“No, dear, that’s the cost of doing business. Deal?”
He dipped his head toward hers and caught her lips in a kiss. This one held the promise of passion, but more, a gift and a thank-you. He didn’t press into her mouth or try to take it any deeper, he simply held her to him, lips to lips, releasing her only to press his forehead to hers. “Deal. And, Jules, don’t worry about what the Colonel said. You’re not fired, and you sure as hell aren’t kicked off the ranch.”
An unfamiliar emotion fluttered in her eyes, but it was gone too quickly for him to pin it down. She patted his chest lightly. “Don’t worry about any of that right now. Focus on taking care of your father. And don’t take no for an answer from him. Don’t yell, don’t try to one-up him. Just let him rage all he wants, then do whatever the hell you want to. Be your grandpa. They told him he didn’t have that much longer to go and he went another six months. Your dad can do the same or longer. So he needs to get used to having you here, and even more so, you need to not try to defend yourself. It’s your home—don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.”
“Why, Dr. Heller, you sly, intelligent woman you. Are you trying to fix me?”
The sober, serious emotion smothering the air around them eased, and her eyes began to twinkle as she gave him a slow yet sinful smile. “If I was trying to fix you, Tanner Wilks, you should remember I know exactly how to geld a stallion.”
“Ouch.” He raised his hands off her. “Have mercy.”
Before she could answer, the door opened and Doc Clayton leaned inside. “Well, he made it through surgery, but we’re all going to have to work on him to change his lifestyle. . . .”
Relief swamped him—true, bone-shaking, muscle-melting relief.
The Colonel made it.